


Sheltered From the Storm, on the Ocean Floor

by shadoutMapes



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, No end in sight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-23
Updated: 2015-06-23
Packaged: 2018-04-05 18:13:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4189944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadoutMapes/pseuds/shadoutMapes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>just some drippy drip drabble about eridanny. maybe destined for something bigger? maybe not</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sheltered From the Storm, on the Ocean Floor

Daymares drift around inside your thinkpan like polygons of harsh sunlight through your ocular shutters, just like that ever-present threat that keeps your head meekly down as painfully as a heavy hand pushing, pushing down on your calcium-based endospine. You know it's not real, you can feel the clamminess of the sopor on your face just as vivid as you can feel her cold in your arms dead as the deeps, but that ain't worth a whole awful lot right now. 

There's a pulpy hole the size of your two beringed fists punched messily through her torso, the vivid tyrian hue of her blood almost glowing, bold fuschia, richly saturated. It runs over your hands, the blood does, her blood, you can't put it back in her, you can't make her eyes open, not ever again, and a scream tears through you, a wordless animal scream.

Her eyes open. Cold, white as death, white as snow, white as seafoam. Her moist dark lips part in a manic grin, her fangs are bloodied and she speaks to you in her fluty, strange voice, the answer to a question you never, ever ask: 

"B-ecause I'm D--EAD, stupid!" 

And it's mean and bitter, this thing she says, because her tone is richly layered with poisonous blame. 

~

You jerk upright with a gasp, choking on slime the way you were told by your lusus a thousand times not to, the way you all did until after your first few molts. Some get good at waking serenely beneath the surface and holding their breath til they sit up, some never quite get the hang of it. Seadwellers' sopor is meant to be sold in higher concentrations. Meant to be. But the stuff doesn’t get any cheaper, and sometimes there are more urgent priorities than a day’s rest. 

Tonight is just another night. There’s work to be done. Things never get any easier on the salty bottom tiers of the hemocaste system. 

You pad barefoot across the worn planks and into the ablution block, which isn’t much of an ablution block really, just a wide, perforated metal basin functioning as a washtub, rainbarrel and the sand filter you spent days refining. Now the water runs through clear as anything, though it’s cold as chum save for the heights of the dry seasons, every fourth perigee. 

Dressing with practiced movements, you don first the fluid leggings and long-sleeved undertunic, then the padded hide bracers and greaves, as well as your flexible metal gauntlets worked with your sigil. Then on goes your long dark tunic, with your sigil this time embroidered in painstakingly obtained violet threat. She’s a dear pearl, your moirail is. 

Your name is Eridan Ampora, seadweller, thief, moirail, and right now, shark-brained singleminded hunter. 

You’re half expecting a glubbed greeting as you enter the nutritionblock, though you know that she’s still away at sea. You aren’t expecting her back for two nights or more. She goes down, down to the darkest indigo deeps, under all that awful pressure past where even you can stand it. She gets pains, Feferi does. 

Mostly it means you two miss each other here and there, each caught up in your own particular work. You, putting grubstuffs on the table; she, portenting doom. 

Grubstuffs being the current objective, you begin rummaging through your stores, passing aside the ubiquitous and unappetizing salted fish in favor of seaweed crisps, a real treat; when toasted and salted, they take on a delightful crunchy texture. One thing you’re not lacking is salt. 

Speaking of salt, you check on the water supply; the rain barrel filter runs water through once into the nutritionblock sink, the tap in the ablutionblock, then reflushes the gray water back to fill up the gaper. It’s a rather complex system for two trolls to have rigged up by themselves in the middle of cavedweller grubfuck nowhere, if a little rough in practice. Sometimes you get fish bones when you’re trying to take a soak in the trap, sometimes the thick rubber bag containing the potable water splits in the night and you have to rely on a half dozen scavenged—Fef says “gleaned”—bottles of Cherry Atmospheric Re-Entry Combustion Faygo which bobbed to the surface of the underground lake to hold you both over until the next rainstorm, because even seadwellers can’t subsist entirely on saline water, and fresh water gets harder and harder to come by with the state of pollution now overtaking the planet. 

But the bag was patched and seems to be holding; the sweet rubber udder is blessedly full after the passing of a rainy spell. One less thing to worry about. There’s never any shortage of things to worry about. 

But not tonight. Tonight you have a job to do.

The assignment seemed simple enough, you reluctantly admit as you freshen up at the tap. Vinegar is a lifesaver here outside the grid, and it’s blessedly easy to make. Not to mention cheap. Good bones and simple murder, a seemingly cut-and-dried assassination. But things are rarely cut-and-dried for an assassin.


End file.
